Is it feasible that people would colonize a planet where a town or city is submerged at high tide so that buildings would have to be watertight with air locks? Nyanzans live by fishing, hunting kraken, collecting shells at low tide or diving for them at high tide. They work and travel in ships and swim short distances wearing transparent helmets and aqualungs that electrolyze oxygen from water. Thus, they are always on or under the water except on the rare occasions when they visit the single island on the planet for trade or diplomacy. (The Imperial Resident resides there.)
"Sunset blazed across violet waters. The white spume of the breakers was turned an incredible gold; tide pools on the naked black skerry were like molten copper. The sky was deep blue in the east, still pale overhead, shading to a clear cloudless green where the sun drowned. Through the surf's huge hollow crashing and grinding, Flandry heard bells from one of the many rose-red spires...or did a ship's bell ring among raking spars, or was it something he had heard in a dream once? Beneath all the noise, it was unutterably peaceful." (p. 323)
The sights and sounds merge with Flandry's imaginings. The sound of a bell from a sunken city recalls Ys. This sunset is simply the end of a day, not a symbol for the decline of Empire or the descent of man.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Given the right technology, and given that the oceans of Nyanza were at least MOSTLY fairly shallow and warm, I think it could be plausible to imagine most people there living on or under the water.
And I too thought of Ys, when I saw the bit about the bell.
Sean
Though you'd need a hefty appetite. Even fairly warm water leeches heat out of your system quickly. That's one reason Polynesians tend to be "hefty" under modern conditions -- their background put a premium on subcutaneous fat. And efficient metabolisms were more likely to survive the long hungry canoe voyages by which many islands in that part of the world were settled.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
And we do see mention in "The Game of Glory" of how Nyanza was richly stocked with edible forms of sea life. So much so that imported BEEF was a coveted delicacy that would be served to one's guests (as we see Inyanduma III doing for Flandry).
Sean
Given millennia of isolation would the Nyanzans develop like the human descendents in "The Horn of Time the Hunter"?
Perhaps it would also require loss of high energy technology for such a development of humans in the direction of seals etc.
Kaor, Jim!
That just might be possible, assuming thousands of years of the Nyanzans being completely isolated from the rest of the human race. But, unlikely, given the availability of a FTL tech enabling people to regularly coming or going from Nyanza.
Ad astra! Sean
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